Last month, many students from the Translation and Localization Management (TLM) and Translation and Interpretation (TI) master’s degree programs at MIIS had the opportunity to attend professional conferences – namely, those held by ATA and TAUS. As each student had their own perspective on what they gained, we’ve reached out to various people and gathered their thoughts below.
ATA 63: Los Angeles – October 12-15, 2022
Maddy Sanchez, MATLM ‘24
Attending the American Translators Association conference allowed me to meet hundreds of my future colleagues, and I tripled my LinkedIn network during the four days I was in Los Angeles. Not only did I meet many professionals in the language industry, but I was also able to meet several alums from the Institute.
In addition to social networking, I attended many presentations relating to my interest in audiovisual translation and localization. One specific talk I listened to, “Getting Unstuck: Using Translation Theory to Get Out of Tough Situation in Media Localization” by Katrina Leonoudakis, was tremendously helpful. Katrina touched on techniques such as devocalization as a method to accurately convey the experience of the source such that the target audience could enjoy it just as much. Another talk that I enjoyed was “Translating Humor and Cultural Traditions: Translation of Rakugo into English, Part I,” in which the speaker, Katsura Sunshine, detailed the difficulties of bringing humorous, traditional Japanese storytelling to a Western audience, highlighting the danger of too much localization through anecdotes of his experiences.
The talks were fascinating. My only regret is that I didn’t get to go to all of them!
Hannah Epstein, MATLM ’24
At first, I was worried that being a first-semester student wouldn’t give me enough experience to make connections properly, but I was wrong! I learned practical applications of class assignments that made me understand what I’m learning, and I encourage any other first-years who are unsure if a conference is worth it to give it a shot.
Personally, one of my favorite parts was Katsura Sunshine’s presentation on rakugo, traditional Japanese storytelling. He introduced his performance with customized entrance music, or debayashi, that blended traditional Japanese instruments like the taiko drum and shamisen with more Western hip-hop. Katsura Sunshine had the room in stitches as he recounted stories of his travels, from an awkward plane ride to an embarrassing encounter with someone who was trying to take his bags at the airport. The last five to ten minutes were for questions, where he explained how he adapted the traditional rakugo story in a way that would apply to a modern Western audience, how to tell the difference between his own original stand-up content and a traditional rakugo story, the difference between Western stand-up comedy with typically more adult content and more family-friendly rakugo, how he picks which stories to tell based on his audience, as well as the regional differences of rakugo in Tokyo (or its historical name Edo) and Osaka.
Jizong Yao, MATI ’23, TFL (Teaching Foreign Language) Specialization
An excellent experience to step out of the ivory tower, ATA is a conference I would highly recommend. As someone with minimal working (and life) experience, this conference was quite eye-opening. Within just four days, I saw a considerable change in myself, from being afraid to talk to others to feeling pain at my incompetency to enjoying every networking chance. Here’s what I learned from this conference:
- A rough understanding of the translation industry in North America and the world. Attendees come from everywhere – Australia, Japan, Canada, everywhere! Most of them work in fields related to health and law, but many work in high-demand industries such as education (parent-teacher meetings), engineering, chemistry, and IT.
- Inspiring opinions related to the translation industry. 160 lectures are offered to attendees to discuss new outcomes from experienced practitioners. In addition, multiple networking sessions were organized in various fashions for us to meet as many people as possible, such as breakfast gatherings, dance parties, topic-based speed networking, Zumba classes, etc.
- Personal connections with professionals, especially MIIS alums. My professor told us jokingly that “we have a MIIS Mafia in this industry,” and this conference underscored this statement for me. MIIS alums are quite established across various industries. I found they were kind and willing to share their insights about this industry, the difficulties in their professions, and tips to solve them.
TAUS Massively Multilingual Conference – October 11-13, 2022
Min Chua, MATLM ’23
This conference focused on machine translation, AI-enabled technology, and the technological aspects of localization. Although I had limited experience with these topics, it was a fruitful learning experience listening to the presentations and having insightful chats with the other attendees. I’m grateful to everyone who were so open and inviting to share their experiences with me.
My biggest takeaways were learning about industry solutions on quality evaluation and prediction (relevant to a class I’m taking now); discovering the vast potential of MT and AI-enabled language technology to expand the horizons of translation – across low-resource languages and across different mediums besides text.
Yiwei Wu, MATLM ’23
My first experience at the TAUS Massively Multilingual Conference was extremely fulfilling and inspiring! Not only did I learn about cutting-edge language technologies, but I was also inspired as an aspiring localization project manager to look into a human-machine integrated future. I engaged in numberless thought-provoking conversations with leading industry professionals who satisfied my curiosity and encouraged my career ambition with their profound insights.
I’d like to quote my favorite line from a speech at the conference: “This industry has its own unique personality.” Indeed, it creates such an integrated community that “nobody wants to leave this industry”! Therefore, I would encourage first-year and second-year TLM students to participate in professional localization conferences and network with industry professionals, which can benefit our career development in the short and long term.
Haiyi Lin, MATLM ’23
My professors strongly recommended TAUS, and now I know why. These three days at TAUS were an inspiring trip for me, one like no other.
I was amazed that the first localization conference I attended was of such high quality. At TAUS, I not only listened to the solutions and visions of major companies for MT and AI but also talked directly with leaders and pioneers in the localization industry.
The panel I was most impressed with was Al-Enabled Translation, where the globalization and localization leads from Intel, Dell, and VMware came together to talk about how their localization teams are using AI to optimize processes to free up “humans” in the human-in-the-loop.
And I was shocked at how amiable the people who talked to me were, even though I am just a newcomer in this industry. CEOs and founders shared their vision of their companies. Program managers shared their career paths and how they got into the localization industry. And talking with senior engineers made me realize that technology is evolving daily. So, we must keep learning new technologies and languages to ensure we do not fall behind.
Ultimately, I would like to quote my favorite line from Renato Beninatto: “We are in the very early stage of a long journey.”
Kyle Chow, MATLM ’23
This was my first in-person localization conference. Although I’m relatively new to localization and MT technology, I found many people who still wanted to answer my questions/curiosities about the industry and what I’d heard in the conference presentations, which made for a fantastic experience!
One general takeaway I have is that for how small the localization industry is, we have a LOT of technology solutions – over 800, according to the enormous Nimdzi chart I’m holding in the picture. Staying up to date with the direction the tech trends are going is an absolute must if you want to be successful in this field.
